About Meshtastic Node pole1.co.uk

About me (Paul) owner of Pole1.co.uk

Hi my names Paul the owner of Pole1.co.uk. Here is a little background on me. I have always been into electronics from a young age (many many years ago) long before the web :)

Growing up I would make various electronic projects.

After leaving school I had an apprenticeship with a local company that made electronic church organs where I was building and testing the organs whilst attending Applecroft technical Collage learning electronics.

After there I worked many years at Marconi Instruments which later was sold to an American company Aeroflex and IFR. They made electronic test equipment, signal generators, microwave analyser, military and Tetra radio test sets, inCircuit PCB testers and specialist equipment (phone and base station simulators) that enabled the development of the 4G mobile phone network.

In the early 80's I was also very much a part of the early UK CB scene. Which tied in with me getting my first car.

Also converted an old B&W dual standard 405/625 VHF/UHF black & white TV so I could watch foreign TV stations, I say watch, I couldn't understand a word and they would drift in and out and took ages to identify what station it was (this is all pre the web) I can bore you with many old man stories.

My Meshtastic Journey how I started

I was first made aware of Meshtastic by watching a youtube video by Andy Kirby, I was instantly interested and asked him where I could purchase a node for myself. Andy gave me a link to the Heltec website where I ordered my first node on 10th Jan 2024. After receiving and setting up my first node and realising there was not a single other node visible in the area. I thought I need to purchase another node and in fact I ordered another two with the intention of giving one to my Son.

I had already set-up my original node to my aerial strapped to a first floor window. And now I was able to monitor the first node with a second node and was please I could pick it up from the end of the road.

I joined a couple of Meshtastic discords and the UK Facebook group to see if anyone else was in in the area. I found Joni who is based south of Bedford in Shortown and later I got chatting to Sooty in Kempston who was nearer but the other side of a hill. Myself and Sooty made Mesh contact but only by one of us driving up a hill :) and we made it our mission to try and make base to base contact. This is when I knew I needed to get an aerial as high as I could above the house. Read below "Project Pole"

Project Pole

Getting the pole on the roof

After much research & experimenting I purchased a McGill Microwaved 6dBi co-linear Antenna. I also purchased a 2 meter aluminium mast Pole, heavy duty bracket and 3M LMR400 coax cable.

The master plan was to get the aerial mounted on the roof apex then the aerial would be 1.5M above the roof. With the node being in the loft so I can power, flash & access it easily.

Now I'm not a fan of ladders so I called a local company and arranged a day for him to come and install the aerial.

When the aerial guy knocked on my door he took one look at me and said "Paul?" by some freak coincidence it was an old mate who I hadn't seen for 15 years!! so weird so after a good chat catching up Jeff installed the aerial. He also staid while I performed some tests just to ensure the installation was ok. If you in the Bedfordshire & Buckinghamshire area I can thoroughly recommend
Smart TV Aerial Company, call 08003168269
Jeff also installed Sooty's Aerial

Here is the node inside the loft. You can see the LMR400 Coax connected to the SMA, The remote BME280 sensor, The external BT / WiFi aerial and the USB-C lead that goes down through an airing cupboard to my Raspberry Pi.

My Meshtastic Equipment / Setup

Because my node is in the loft I needed to communicated to it from my Android phone via bluetooth the built in Heltec Blutooth / WiFi aerial is not the best so first thing I did was to modify it I removed the internal coil antenna and soldered a pigtail coax to SMA RF connector.
I also wanted to mount the Heltec inside a metal case. The reason for Metal is because it will screen it from external signals from the Mesh and Bluetooth aerials. It will also be better in the event of a fault something got hot or worse still catch fire being in a metal case will stop premature collapse of a plastic case.

Here is the metal case build
I used bulk a head USB-C connector for connection to my Raspberry Pi and power. You can see both the Lora Aerial and the BT/WiFi aerial connected via SMA connectors aerials shown were just to test. There is also a bulk-head RJ45 connector this is to connect a BME280 temperature, Humidity & Barometric air pressure sensor via the I2C interface on the Heltec. so it is external from the metal box.

Here is the finished enclosure on bench test before fitting in the loft. I did as many functional real world measurements before and after installing in the metal case, like monitoring Signal To noise ratio using external node at set distances and I believe there was an improvement.

The node in the loft connects via 6M USBc lead to the Raspberry Pi which in turn is power by a DC UPS battery backup. The Raspberry pi is running Debian Linux with Meshtastic Python CLI and the code that does the reporting and sends to the website server. Live received nodes report